The ‘wife’ references in that review have me puzzled!

 

Yes , the reviewer seems somehow confused . It would be a shame if his songs do not get the attention they deserve . Interesting review . Cannot wait to see the movie .

 

I've been really excited reading about the movie today and then reading that review has dampened my enthusiasm somewhat.

 

It will be interesting to see what people make of it.

I still think the movie and the way it is presented will turn out great. The reviewer is wondering what exactly is making Robbie such a big star. That is the reaction they were going for. If someone is slightly interested, they will check Robbie on their own, discover the charm etc.

Hmm, I am tempering my expectations also.

 

I just don’t think it is going to be received with the enthusiasm we had hoped for.

 

The few reviews I am seeing on Letterboxd so far also appear to be quite put off by the warts and all nature of it.

 

People always claim they want a warts and all account and that they admire honesty, but I don’t think they really do.

They want to be shown sympathetic and likeable character; they want comforting lies.

Hence Bohemian Rhapsody doing so well.

 

I am afraid that the many people who think badly of Rob are going to be given ammunition.

 

I hope I am wrong.

I agree with the above post. Those were my thoughts exactly. All the other biopics have been softened versions of reality as they are essentially hoping for a sales revival and don't want their protagonist too far removed from likeability.

 

I had high hopes for Greatest Days -Take That feature musical- in Britain at least, but that left after two weeks in the cinemas. It is a hard one to call until the movie is out. I will admit I was excited but now I'm apprehensive.

 

There is a long period still before it is released.

Edited September 1, 2024Sep 1 by nirvanamusic

Yes, there are some "Ouch" reviews out there ....

https://letterboxd.com/film/better-man-2024/

I doubt this movie was made for just fans though & Robbie himself was never one for holding back when he has something to say , sometimes it works in his favour & sometimes not . He's a risk taker , always was , people either like him or don't .

 

 

To Gracey, drawing moviegoers completely unfamiliar with Williams will be the clearest mark of success.

 

“The people I really want to see this film are the people who have no interest in Robbie Williams,” Gracey said. “That, to me, is the truest victory. That is where the monkey transcends the narrative.” - quote from NY Times ...

Wow, just read those reviews... the question is: do they listen to the audience prior to release day or stand wholeheartedly with their creative decisions?

It’s way too late to change anything now that it has premiered.

Those reviews are nasty 😬. I hope we get better responses in the following projections.

Hmm, I am tempering my expectations also.

 

I just don’t think it is going to be received with the enthusiasm we had hoped for.

 

The few reviews I am seeing on Letterboxd so far also appear to be quite put off by the warts and all nature of it.

 

People always claim they want a warts and all account and that they admire honesty, but I don’t think they really do.

They want to be shown sympathetic and likeable character; they want comforting lies.

Hence Bohemian Rhapsody doing so well.

 

I am afraid that the many people who think badly of Rob are going to be given ammunition.

 

I hope I am wrong.

 

 

Rocket Man was a warts and all and that did very well tbf.

Hmm, I am tempering my expectations also.

 

I just don’t think it is going to be received with the enthusiasm we had hoped for.

 

The few reviews I am seeing on Letterboxd so far also appear to be quite put off by the warts and all nature of it.

 

People always claim they want a warts and all account and that they admire honesty, but I don’t think they really do.

They want to be shown sympathetic and likeable character; they want comforting lies.

Hence Bohemian Rhapsody doing so well.

 

I am afraid that the many people who think badly of Rob are going to be given ammunition.

 

I hope I am wrong.

 

Yes! totally agree -I think a lot of people feel very uncomfortable with Rob's no holds barred approach and are people going to pay money to be made to feel uncomfortable?

 

He's such a marmite character.

 

I'm excited to see the graphics - I'm excited to see the story telling. Not so excited to read people slagging it off though.

Rocket Man was a warts and all and that did very well tbf.

 

I loved Rocketman, but it was a very sanitised version of ‘warts and all’.

 

Not as sanitised as Bohemian Rhapsody (which outright lied), but when you compare it to what Elton admitted to in his

book it makes him look practically innocent.

 

He did a lot more sex, drugs and violence than the film shows.

 

 

Variety: https://variety.com/2024/film/reviews/bette...pic-1236127062/

 

Playlist: https://theplaylist.net/better-man-review-m...uride-20240902/

 

So the monkey thing either works for people or it doesn’t.

 

Hopefully it will arouse enough curiosity for people to go and see it, but I am definitely racketing my expectations downwards.

 

Particularly since I am a pedant and I kinda hate whe movies play fast-and-loose with the truth, as this one obviously does.

Aaand, I’ve just read the extremely spoilery last line of a bad review on Letterboxd that makes it sound absolutely bonkers amazing.

 

So now I don’t know what to think!!

“BETTER MAN” - REVIEW - "VARIETY"

 

‘Better Man’ Review: Robbie Williams Biopic Would Be a Snooze, but for the Wild Choice to Depict Him as a Chimp . After the smash success of 'Rocketman' (which he produced), Michael Gracey tackles the life of Britain's best-selling local artist with a twist: He appears as a computer-generated ape throughout.

 

When Robbie Williams told an interviewer that he felt like a performing monkey, he didn’t mean it literally. But that’s exactly how “The Greatest Showman” director Michael Gracey interprets the remark in “Better Man,” an off-the-wall musical biopic that surely would have seemed banal — as opposed to downright bananas — had it featured a flesh-and-blood actor in the Robbie Williams role.

 

Gracey takes audiences through all the expected beats of Williams’ career, from his breakthrough as a member of Take That to his record-breaking solo concert at Knebworth, but does so with a CG chimpanzee standing in for the Britpop bad boy. Against all odds, that gimmick works, distinguishing the project from so many other cookie-cutter pop-star hagiographies. If you want to fawn over this boy-band backup singer-turned-solo superstar for four hours, check out the “Robbie Williams” doc series on Netflix. But if you want to see a chimp doing coke with Oasis, or getting a fateful handjob in front of manager Nigel Martin Smith (Damon Herriman), this is your movie. By inserting what looks an awful lot like Caesar from the new-and-improved “Planet of the Apes” franchise in Williams’ place, Gracey dodges the main question folks have about musical biopics — namely, “Who’s gonna play him?” So, if you worry whether the whole chimp thing could be distracting, don’t forget how barmy it felt pretending that Elton John’s life would have turned out the same if he’d looked anything like Taron Egerton, or that a pair of false teeth could transform Rami Malek into the strutting phallus that was Freddie Mercury.

 

Recently, “Stardust,” “Back to Black” and even “Elvis” were undermined by the chasm we felt between those films’ lead actors and the pop icons they were supposed to be portraying. By contrast, “Better Man” falls squarely in that uncanny valley, and for once, that’s a good thing. First off, Americans don’t really know who Williams is, making it easy to accept whatever Gracey puts in his place. Better still, his simian CG counterpart proves far more expressive than most human actors, meaning the movie is built around an animated performance powerful enough to wring tears.

 

With “Better Man,” the musical maestro adds ridiculously complicated technical challenges to his résumé — like the jaw-dropping “Rock DJ” number staged in London’s busy Regent Street, shot over four days and stitched together to look like a single unbroken take, or the “Come Undone” sequence where he speeds away from the boy-band breakup, nearly smashes his car into an oncoming bus and plunges into a sea of paparazzi. These numbers deliver essential emotional information in the unimaginably dynamic ways, leaving traditional tuners in the dust.

 

And yet, “Better Man” suffers from the same issue that afflicts nearly all pop-star portraits: Instead of picking a significant chapter from their subjects’ lives, these biopics typically take the cradle-to-the-grave approach (or cradle-to-rehab, as the case may be). That works for docs, but when it comes to dramatic retellings, the strategy forces the world’s most fascinating characters into familiar arcs: First they demonstrate natural talent, then they’re discovered, then they become insanely rich and famous, before sabotaging it all with addiction, infidelity and ego. If they’re lucky, they don’t OD, assuring normies everywhere they’re better off not being famous.

 

Better Man” wants to be “All That Jazz,” but it falls back on the redemptive life-story formula, introducing Robbie as a boy — or in this case, an adolescent chimp, looking scrawnier (and a great deal hairier) than his peers. Little Robbie’s bad at sports, worse at school, but a natural clown, as he learns during a school play. Robbie gets that cheeky streak from his father, a cabaret comedian (stage name Peter Conway, played here by Steve Pemberton) who leaves home to pursue his own showbiz dreams when Robbie was just a lad.

 

The truth is more complicated, but a stunted man-child searching for Dad’s approval makes Williams relatable. Gracey extensively interviewed the superstar about his life, then constructed the narrative he wanted to tell with co-writers Simon Gleeson and Oliver Cole. His angle is frustratingly familiar, though the execution is downright astonishing — we’re talking Wachowski-level ingenuity as Gracey fashions sophisticated montages where you can’t even spot the cuts.

 

Consider the scene where Williams learns his most unconditional supporter has died, just before playing his biggest show. The camera starts with a tight closeup on Robbie’s eyes, then pulls out to reveal him suspended upside-down above the stage, rotating 180 degrees as it flies over the heads of several thousand fans. His eyes are the best thing about that scene — and every scene. They make all the difference: dazzling green and stylized to look more human than chimp-like. Gracey’s visual effects team (led by Wētā whizzes Luke Millar and Andy Taylor) studied hours of archival footage in order to get the singer’s facial expressions just right, so every squint, wink and scowl corresponds to the real Robbie.

 

Disarmingly unfiltered at times, Williams swears up a storm, dropping expletives (and trou) without warning — an irreverent trait Gracey slyly re-creates here, placing the chimp in familiar photo shoots. He even offers a version of the “Rock DJ” music video, in which Williams strips down to his insides. The star’s ape avatar goes through a staggering range of emotions over the course of the movie, from smitten with fellow pop star Nicole Appleton (Raechelle Banno) to devastated by her decision to abort their child for a No. 1 hit. Even his bisexuality is fair game, making “Better Man” a better movie than “Bohemian Rhapsody.” Same goes for his clinical depression, even if the death match between all of his different personas (which plays out like “War for the Planet of the Apes”) takes his self-destructive tendencies a step too far.

 

No matter how dark Williams gets, he remains an undeniably charming character, rendered even moreso by the monkey thing. Frankly, Gracey’s chimpanzee conceit was always a stretch, since the “performing monkey” put-down really only applies when Williams is doing someone else’s bidding. Behind the CG ape is a real actor, Jonno Davies, who performed his trickiest scenes on set, including much of Ashley Wallen’s inventive choreography. It’s hard to say how much of Davies’ work survives, though the finishing-touch animation is so good, the Academy needs to find the right category in which to acknowledge it.

 

https://variety.com/2024/film/reviews/bette...pic-1236127062/

Edited September 2, 2024Sep 2 by Sydney11

‘Better Man’ Review: Robbie Williams Is Played by a CGI Monkey in a Wonderfully Bananas Musical Biopic

Telluride: "The Greatest Showman" director Michael Gracey returns with another wild movie that feels like a cure for the common musical.

 

Ladies and gents, this is the moment you’ve waited for (woah woah!): “The Greatest Showman” director Michael Gracey has returned from whatever alien planet he comes from, and he’s brought another electrifyingly demented musical biopic along with him. This one’s a long-overdue corrective to the wave of fully authorized, insufferably generic rise-fall-recover stories that have turned celebrity estates into every film critic’s greatest threat.

 

“Better Man” tells the story of Robbie Williams, the bad boy of British pop, and it’s a story you’ve heard a thousand times before. A big-eyed kid dreams of becoming a star in order to fix the hole in his heart; he achieves more success than he ever dared to imagine; it affords him the money to make his problems so much worse at the expense of his personal relationships; and then he snaps out of it before it’s too late.

 

But for all of its bedrock familiarity, Gracey’s film distinguishes itself in two utterly transformative ways. The first and most important is that Robbie Williams is a wildly insecure asshole. And that’s one of the nicer things that people have called him. (His disembodied voice asks, “Who is Robbie Williams?” over the opening credits, only to answer that rhetorical question with options like “narcissistic,” “punchable,” and “just a f***ing twat”). He’s also honest, vulnerable, and self-aware in a way that touches every facet of the bitingly satirical movie that follows, but at no point does “Better Man” sugarcoat the fact that Williams was hellbent on becoming famous to win the love of his cabaret-obsessed dad, Peter (Steve Pemberton), who left the family to pursue his own music career despite lacking the talent to make it (“You’re born with it or you’re a nobody,” he tells the boy). f*** the craft; Williams just craves the spotlight. “Who cares if you love it?” he says. “What matters is if other people love you doing it.”

 

The other thing that sets “Better Man” apart from the rest of its ilk — and this might be too subtle for some people to notice — is that Williams is played by a computer-generated monkey for the entire film. Please feel free to read that sentence again if you need to. Imagine if “Bohemian Rhapsody” starred Caesar from “Rise of the Planet of the Apes,” and you’ll have exactly the right idea of what that might look like. Indeed, Gracey relied on the same Weta FX artists who worked on those simian epics, with Jonno Davies wearing Andy Serkis’ motion-capture suit (Williams voices the part himself).

 

You will see a monkey bleach its hair. You will see a monkey party with Oasis. You will see a monkey do unreasonable amounts of cocaine, stick a heroin needle in between the fur of its arm, and drive headlong into opposing traffic while shouting a pop song at the top of its monkey lungs. Before the film screened at Telluride, Gracey told the audience that he was simply hoping to literalize Williams’ self-image as a performing monkey, but the movie itself offers no direct explanation, in large part because all the other characters don’t see Williams the same way he sees himself: unevolved.

 

Paramount may want to consider a video introduction or a title card before unleashing this thing in AMCs across the country, but the effect is plenty transfixing on its own. It never lets you forget that Williams is different, and that he’s at the mercy of his own wounded ambition; you can’t help but gawk at him like the star that he is, share in his embarrassment when he becomes the most troubled member of boy band Take That, or to appreciate his instinct that a normal life was never in the cards. By the end of the movie, you see him as human all the same, even if Gracey never dares to drop the bit.

 

It’s hard to overstate how dramatically Williams’ hooligan persona — and the movie’s fantastical illustration thereof — transform otherwise rote material into something fresh, though fans of “The Greatest Showman” already know about Gracey’s singular flair for exaggeration. In the first of several musical numbers set to future Williams hits, young monkey Robert belts “Feel” as he shuffles through the dour streets of Stoke-on-Trent, every shot glazed with an expressionistic hyper-reality that leads back to P.T. Barnum’s childhood. The sequence is all the more vulnerable and heartfelt because of the cheeky voiceover that surrounds it on both sides.

 

Later bursts of song and dance will up the stakes much higher. Gracey, along with co-writers Oliver Cole and Simon Gleeson, bust out the anthemic “Rock DJ” when Take That hit it big, triggering an orgiastic flash mob through downtown London that hilariously interweaves the director’s Technicolor imagination with his subject’s “f*** you, I’m famous!” sense of humor. By the time Williams and his bandmates are pogo-sticking down Regent Street while half of Britain pops and locks behind them, “Better Man” has achieved the sort of giddy musical nirvana that only a small handful of filmmakers can bring to life. Williams’ meet-cute with Nicole Appleton (Raechelle Banno) aboard the bow of a superyacht might be even better, as a firework-lit montage set to “She’s the One” brightens their love affair into the sort of tabloid-ready spectacle the singer has always dreamed about.

 

Things get darker from there, of course, with the songs increasingly punctuated by visions of Williams’ insecurities (picture a sneering monkey in a red Adidas tracksuit), but Williams’ commentary finds the bright side to all but his bleakest moments, and Gracey’s artistry even brings a certain high to the scenes where the pop star bottoms out (a frightening underwater sequence suggests the director could make a great horror movie should he ever get bored of telling heartfelt stories about indefatigable dreamers). If Bob Fosse had fallen in love with CGI instead of jazz hands, this is probably the kind of movie he would’ve made.

 

But Gracey’s war against biopic convention isn’t the massacre its first hour might lead you to hope for, as the film’s pop psychology isn’t at all nuanced enough to sustain the full drudgery of Williams’ downward spiral. Much as a grief-stricken performance of “Angel” puffs some wind into the story’s wings, long gaps between musical numbers limit Gracey’s opportunities to mess with convention, and the age-old folly of trying to fit someone’s entire life story into 135 minutes begins to rear its ugly head.

 

That Williams is such a candid narrator — and even more forthright about his demons than Elton John allowed Dexter Fletcher to be in the Gracey-produced “Rocketman” — is a massive boon to the parts where he’s riding high. That advantage evens out when he’s at his lowest, though it’s interesting that drugs are less responsible for his rock bottom than the emptiness of success (and even more interesting that the film never resolves his addiction). “How can you not know who you are when there are thousands of people screaming your name?” Williams once asked his son, incapable of understanding how the world’s brightest spotlight might see right through you. But even as he prepares for “the biggest music event in British history,” Williams is still wracked by self-doubt. The singer dents easily, and not even £80 million is enough to convince a man that he is, as well.

 

Stick it out through Williams’ long night of the soul, however, and “Better Man” rewards your patience with an ending that makes good on its gimmick, and — to a surprisingly moving degree — also on its choice of title song. Williams finds the beneficence required to share the spotlight with the one person who needs it more than he does. It might feel like a cop-out in a less vulnerable biopic, but here it’s a beautiful testament to a man who followed a familiar path in his own way, and the perfect ending to a film that does exactly the same.

 

https://www.indiewire.com/criticism/movies/...ams-1235042892/

 

 

 

What a great review at Indie + Variety too.

Yes, really in-depth intetesting reviews.